In Finland, the secret to finding happiness is to not try

Shehzad Ali is a professor of public health and Canada Research Chair at Western University.

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Happiness is elusive. Aristotle spent half his life philosophizing about how to attain it, yet even he might struggle to make sense of Finland. This month, the country topped the World Happiness Report’s ranking for the ninth year in a row, despite having a sun that routinely forgets to show up and a wind that behaves like it’s taken a personal dislike to your face.

On paper, Finland should be a case study in seasonal depression: With only six hours of daylight in the depths of winter, the Finns have a national relationship with darkness that borders on romantic. Add to that the sub-zero temperatures and skies that never lift, and by all reasonable expectations, it should be the capital of collective grumpiness.

And yet, the dominant mood I encountered when I visited recently for an academic conference was not endurance but calm. Not “we’re coping” calm. Not “we’ve done our breathing exercises” calm. Just calm – content, almost suspiciously okay. I came expecting to freeze but left questioning everything I’d previously assumed about happiness.

Canada ranks 25th out of 147 countries in the 2026 World Happiness Report

I arrived in Helsinki at midnight and, exhausted, took a taxi to the hotel. The driver – an immigrant adapting to Finnish life – drove in silence. I tried to make small talk, which genuinely surprised him. Apparently, Finns value quiet and personal space. Susan Cain, author of Quiet and Quiet Power, once joked that you can tell a Finn likes you if he’s staring at your shoes instead of his own.

I’ve long believed that happiness is found with other people. You see this attitude in southern Europe or in South Asia, where I grew up. In these places, happiness is considered a group sport and the good life is, by definition, a crowded one. Silence, to me, feels like a problem to be fixed – with people, or failing that, with a screen. Finland, it turns out, is perfectly content to not fill it.

Finns aren’t reclusive, but they’re strikingly comfortable being alone. And even when they’re with others, they don’t feel the need to constantly engage. A shop assistant told me that Finnish couples can sit together for an hour without speaking. Back home in Canada, we’d have treated minute 10 of silence as a warning sign and booked couples therapy before the hour was up.

Finland introduced me to a word that seems lodged in Finnish bones: sisu. It’s often translated as “resilience,” though the meaning thins in English. Sisu is a kind of “quiet toughness,” but even that sounds too deliberate for what it describes. It isn’t a reasoned decision to persevere and it’s definitely not grit for show; it’s closer to an unspoken acceptance of the conditions that surround us, that this is simply how things are. No drama, no complaint, no motivational speech – just getting on with it.

I didn’t really understand that until I met a math teacher on a boat trip to Suomenlinna, the sea fortress near Helsinki. Midway through, he mentioned – in the same tone you might comment on the weather – that he was a widower, and often came to the island alone to watch the sunset. There was no sadness in the telling, and no effort to reassure me that he was coping. He had a coffee flask, sensible gear for the cold, and an ease with his own company. Not happy. Not unhappy. Just present.

Only later did I realize how unexceptional this is in Finland. Almost half of households are single-person, complicating the tidy idea that happiness lives only in relationships. Finns are simply, and unremarkably, okay within themselves.

One reason this works is that Finland runs more on a functional government than community. Where much of the world relies on people, favours, and knowing someone who knows someone, Finns rely on institutions. Things work. Public services work. Hospitals work. Even bureaucracy works – a fact Finns mention with quiet pride. There’s an unspoken social contract that mostly holds.

And then there is the sauna. Finland has almost as many saunas as people, and Finns spend hours a week in them, making it less a leisure activity and more just a mundane part of life. I considered trying one myself, until I realized it involved being naked around a group of strangers. (Much later, and too late, I learned that awkward tourists can ask for a towel.)

If you believe the research – and Bryan Johnson, the self-optimizing spectre of Silicon Valley attempting to live to 150 – regular sauna use may do more for your health than quitting smoking. More interestingly, to me at least, is that some studies have also confirmed the claim that the path to improved mental health, even to happiness, may run through what researchers unromantically call thermotherapy chambers.

But I didn’t get the sense that Finns, who’ve been using saunas for thousands of years, were influenced much by the studies, or any quest for a happy life. Perhaps that’s the real Finnish trick – not cracking the code to happiness, but quietly opting out of the chase. Letting life be what it is. If it’s dark, cold, hard, or quiet, let it be.

Maybe their secret is treating happiness less as a hedonic treadmill of joy, and more as a steady rock of contentment you can stand on. I’m not there yet. But I did buy a sauna. It’s a start.